Couplets: A Love Story

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I've never read a better encapsulation of what it means to question a previously fixed idea of identity and selfhood. The continuous, stream-of-consciousness vibe really worked to represent the panic and questioning that comes with this kind of experience. Read it quick because it's mostly composed of couplets (no surprise there, haha), but its length did not detract from the story at all. I’m not sure whether it was the structure; I heavily preferred the vignettes to the poetry, and I liked the use of second person in the vignettes, but I found the story somewhat overdone and overwritten.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink,” by Edna St.It's a story of romantic attachment and romantic betrayal told almost entirely in rhymed couplets, and it's a balancing act of such sly virtuosity that it may give you vertigo. Maggie Millner’s captivating, seductive debut is a love story in poems that explores obsession, gender, identity, and the art and act of literary transformation.

From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Giving it 3 stars as I don’t think this is a book which will stick with me but whilst I listened to it I did really enjoy it and found the poetry really pleasant to experience. She falls into a consuming affair--into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind.What ensues is an exploration of obsession, gender, identity-making, sexual experiment, and the art and act of literary transformation.

Told in a mixture of rhyming couplets and prose poems, the novel flows beautiful and is compulsively readable. couplets (brilliant to use the form couplets for this subject) ponders the ways in which desire drives our decisions, how relationships mold us or change us or maybe do nothing at all but remain a singularity, and interweaves literary analysis on love. The brevity suits the transitory feelings and intense phases it’s dealing with - the romance with a woman (her first queer relationship) that catalyses a breakup with a long-term partner, the realisation that you take yourself with you into every new situation.

Political and poetic considerations of storytelling—the pitfalls of narrativizing one’s own life and the lives of others—infuse this absorbing tale of falling out and in and out of love . Starts with a lot of references to a particular kind of life in Brooklyn but then relaxes and becomes quite heartfelt and sincere (without taking itself too seriously).

Couplets is propulsive, poignant, and terrific at showing the way carnality is tethered to vulnerability.

I don’t mean to break my personal rule of not praising books for their length but it’s a very quick read. She falls into a consuming affair—into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind. Lovers of horny, rhyming poetry rejoice: Millner's 'love story in poems' arrives a week before Valentine's Day, just in time to tie your brain to its bedposts. In rhyming couplets and prose vignettes, Couplets chronicles the strictures, structures, and pitfalls of relationships--the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments--and how the people we love can show us who we truly are. She falls into a consuming affair―into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind.